Ford Foundation

The Ford Foundation is a charitable foundation based in New York City created to fund programs that promote democracy, reduce poverty and promote international understanding. The current chair is Susan V. Berresford.

After the deaths of Henry Ford in 1947 and Edsel Ford in 1943, the Ford Foundation commissioned a report to determine how the foundation should continue. The committee, headed by H. Rowan Gaither, recommended that the foundation should commit to promoting peace, freedom, and education throughout the world. To provide funding for various projects, the board of directors decided to diversify the foundation's portfolio and gradually divested itself of its substantial Ford Motor Company stock between 1955 and 1974. Through this divestiture, the Ford Motor Company became a public company in 1956.

Other than its name, the Ford Foundation has not had any connections to the Ford Motor Company nor the Ford family for over thirty years. Henry Ford II, the last remaining Ford on the board of directors, resigned from the foundation board in 1976 due to his frustration with what he believed was the foundation's arrogance and anti-capitalist attitudes.

As of the end of the 2004 fiscal year, the foundation reported a total investment portfolio of $10.5 billion, giving out around $520 million in grants for the year.

Critics

In 2005, Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox began a probe of the foundation. Though the Ford Foundation is headquarted in New York City, it is chartered in Michigan, giving the state jurisdiction. Cox is focusing on its governance, potential conflicts of interest among board members, and its poor record of giving to charities in Michigan. Between 1998 and 2002, the Ford Foundation gave Michigan charities about $2.5 million per year, far less than many other charities. Cox is hoping that this probe will prod the foundation into giving more to Michigan charities. [1]

Certain critics such as former Binghamton University professor James Petras have criticized the Foundation for links with the CIA. Petras cites former Foundation president Richard Bissell's relationship with DCI Allen Dulles and involvement with the Marshall Plan during the 1950s. Petras also criticises the Ford Foundation for funding what he terms "anti-leftist" human rights groups that "do not participate in anti-globalization and anti-neoliberal mass actions."[2]

Another American academic, Joan Roelofs, in Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (State University of New York Press, 2003,) argues that Ford and similar foundations play a key role in co-opting opposition movements: "While dissent from ruling class ideas is labeled 'extremism' and is isolated, individual dissenters may be welcomed and transformed. Indeed, ruling class hegemony is more durable if it is not rigid and narrow, but is able dynamically to incorporate emergent trends." She reports that John J. McCloy, while chairman of the Foundation's board of trustees, "...thought of the Foundation as a quasi-extension of the U.S. government. It was his habit, for instance, to drop by the National Security Council (NSC) in Washington every couple of months and casually ask whether there were any overseas projects the NSC would like to see funded." Roelofs also charges that the Ford Foundation financed counter-insurgency programs in Indonesia and other countries.

Recipients of funding

Further reading

Frances Stonor Saunders (2001), The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, New Press, ISBN 1-56584-664-8. [Aka, Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War 1999, Granta (UK edition)].

Edward H Berman The Ideology of Philanthropy: The influence of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller foundations on American foreign policy, State University of New York Press, 1983. Excerpt available here